Words So Small | Theresa Darling

Behind every sound
is the true sound: Hush,
air rests. The cumbersome world
outside asks why she has settled for this
but she cannot speak. Her words are so small
they slip around her tongue avoiding
acidity, evading the touch
of a disappointing discovery.
They disappear, like sand
born of some greater stone,
weathered, mingled, suddenly lost
amidst the dance of windblown grass
and the music of its rhythm.
The voice inside her head is a violin.
It weeps, climbs, falls,
weeps again.
She comes home from work
to work, one moment and movement
linked to many other movements.
Word and voice.
Dance and body.
Complex reconciliations join what she dreamed
would be a fabulous journey
with an embittered destination.
Yet still, she feels incomplete.
She plunges on, full and busy
her essence homeless, needing, always
borrowing from a better measure.
She cannot wait for an ending
even too near. This small rock
rests on a larger rock.
This woman.
That man.
The words between them are a brown-green creek
touching both. No, give them lakes!
No, give them oceans
lapping at both shores. Between them
an exploding universe
or nothing. Truth pressing
or eternal death, echoing.
Air bathes all possibilities, its ripples unseen,
like water far beneath the surface
of a deep-cutting boat, or parched leaves
folding white-silver back upon themselves,
painfully baring their vulnerability
then hurriedly rushing forward
but like rocks
never wholly going anywhere.
Who can say what lies between nothing and one?
She believes there is something unspeakable.
He is sure rock and water say nothing,
really, but she believes the voice
inside her:
Hush, the world outside no longer exists.
Everything happens
inside of her